The present invention relates to application file encoding, and more specifically, to self re-encoding of an interpreted application.
Software developers often export a file for use in developing a sub-system from one computing platform which may be in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) encoding or Unicode encoding (e.g., as used in operating systems such as Windows, Linux, etc.) to another target computing platform that uses another encoding. An example of an encoding for a target computing platform may be, for example, an Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) encoding scheme. To perform the translation step conventionally, the developer must manually transfer the file with the non-native encoding to the target system, and the developer re-encodes the application file using an existing re-encoding tool. The developer must then remember specific translation steps for re-encoding that are specific to the target platform, and if the developer is in the position to perform the translation twice, errors can ensue and the file may be corrupted.
Conventional systems are not able to, without additional changes to the interpreter and without an additional re-encoding tool, execute the interpreted application on a target platform with same encoding as the application file code, and also execute the same interpreted program on another platform with encoding different from the encoding of the interpreted application. Moreover, no conventional system automatically re-encodes an interpreted application to both native and non-native encoding target platforms without interaction with or additional steps performed by a user (i.e., a developer), without regard to whether the developer knows the target platform encoding scheme.